OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
ALens: An Adaptive Domain-Oriented Abstract Writing Training Tool for Novice Researchers
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

The significance of novice researchers acquiring proficiency in writing abstracts has been extensively documented in the field of higher education, where they often encounter challenges in this process. Traditionally, students have been advised to enroll in writing training courses as a means to develop their abstract writing skills. Nevertheless, this approach frequently falls short in providing students with personalized and adaptable feedback on their abstract writing. To address this gap, we initially conducted a formative study to ascertain the user requirements for an abstract writing training tool. Subsequently, we proposed a domain-specific abstract writing training tool called ALens, which employs rhetorical structure parsing to identify key concepts, evaluates abstract drafts based on linguistic features, and employs visualization techniques to analyze the writing patterns of exemplary abstracts. A comparative user study involving an alternative abstract writing training tool has been conducted to demonstrate the efficacy of our approach.
Low-complexity Resource Allocation for Uplink RSMA in Future 6G Wireless Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

Uplink rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) requires optimization of decoding order and power allocation, while decoding order is a discrete variable, and it is very complex to find the optimal decoding order if the number of users is large enough. This letter proposes a low-complexity user pairing-based resource allocation algorithm with the objective of minimizing the maximum latency. Closed-form expressions for power and bandwidth allocation for a given latency are first derived. Then a bisection method is used to determine the minimum latency and optimal resource allocation. Finally, the proposed algorithm is compared with unpaired RSMA using an exhaustive method to obtain the optimal decoding order, unpaired RSMA using a suboptimal decoding order, paired non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and unpaired NOMA. The results show that our proposed algorithm outperforms NOMA and achieves similar performance to unpaired RSMA. In addition, the complexity of the proposed algorithm is significantly reduced.
Exploring the Spatiotemporal Features of Online Food Recommendation Service
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

Online Food Recommendation Service (OFRS) has remarkable spatiotemporal characteristics and the advantage of being able to conveniently satisfy users' needs in a timely manner. There have been a variety of studies that have begun to explore its spatiotemporal properties, but a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the OFRS spatiotemporal features is yet to be conducted. Therefore, this paper studies the OFRS based on three questions: how spatiotemporal features play a role; why self-attention cannot be used to model the spatiotemporal sequences of OFRS; and how to combine spatiotemporal features to improve the efficiency of OFRS. Firstly, through experimental analysis, we systemically extracted the spatiotemporal features of OFRS, identified the most valuable features and designed an effective combination method. Secondly, we conducted a detailed analysis of the spatiotemporal sequences, which revealed the shortcomings of self-attention in OFRS, and proposed a more optimized spatiotemporal sequence method for replacing self-attention. In addition, we also designed a Dynamic Context Adaptation Model to further improve the efficiency and performance of OFRS. Through the offline experiments on two large datasets and online experiments for a week, the feasibility and superiority of our model were proven.
Scope Loss for Imbalanced Classification and RL Exploration
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We demonstrate equivalence between the reinforcement learning problem and the supervised classification problem. We consequently equate the exploration exploitation trade-off in reinforcement learning to the dataset imbalance problem in supervised classification, and find similarities in how they are addressed. From our analysis of the aforementioned problems we derive a novel loss function for reinforcement learning and supervised classification. Scope Loss, our new loss function, adjusts gradients to prevent performance losses from over-exploitation and dataset imbalances, without the need for any tuning. We test Scope Loss against SOTA loss functions over a basket of benchmark reinforcement learning tasks and a skewed classification dataset, and show that Scope Loss outperforms other loss functions.
ChatSim: Underwater Simulation with Natural Language Prompting
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Robots are becoming an essential part of many operations including marine exploration or environmental monitoring. However, the underwater environment presents many challenges, including high pressure, limited visibility, and harsh conditions that can damage equipment. Real-world experimentation can be expensive and difficult to execute. Therefore, it is essential to simulate the performance of underwater robots in comparable environments to ensure their optimal functionality within practical real-world contexts.OysterSim generates photo-realistic images and segmentation masks of objects in marine environments, providing valuable training data for underwater computer vision applications. By integrating ChatGPT into underwater simulations, users can convey their thoughts effortlessly and intuitively create desired underwater environments without intricate coding. \invis{Moreover, researchers can realize substantial time and cost savings by evaluating their algorithms across diverse underwater conditions in the simulation.} The objective of ChatSim is to integrate Large Language Models (LLM) with a simulation environment~(OysterSim), enabling direct control of the simulated environment via natural language input. This advancement can greatly enhance the capabilities of underwater simulation, with far-reaching benefits for marine exploration and broader scientific research endeavors.
An Empirical Analysis of Range for 3D Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

LiDAR-based 3D detection plays a vital role in autonomous navigation. Surprisingly, although autonomous vehicles (AVs) must detect both near-field objects (for collision avoidance) and far-field objects (for longer-term planning), contemporary benchmarks focus only on near-field 3D detection. However, AVs must detect far-field objects for safe navigation. In this paper, we present an empirical analysis of far-field 3D detection using the long-range detection dataset Argoverse 2.0 to better understand the problem, and share the following insight: near-field LiDAR measurements are dense and optimally encoded by small voxels, while far-field measurements are sparse and are better encoded with large voxels. We exploit this observation to build a collection of range experts tuned for near-vs-far field detection, and propose simple techniques to efficiently ensemble models for long-range detection that improve efficiency by 33% and boost accuracy by 3.2% CDS.
Online Distillation-enhanced Multi-modal Transformer for Sequential Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

Multi-modal recommendation systems, which integrate diverse types of information, have gained widespread attention in recent years. However, compared to traditional collaborative filtering-based multi-modal recommendation systems, research on multi-modal sequential recommendation is still in its nascent stages. Unlike traditional sequential recommendation models that solely rely on item identifier (ID) information and focus on network structure design, multi-modal recommendation models need to emphasize item representation learning and the fusion of heterogeneous data sources. This paper investigates the impact of item representation learning on downstream recommendation tasks and examines the disparities in information fusion at different stages. Empirical experiments are conducted to demonstrate the need to design a framework suitable for collaborative learning and fusion of diverse information. Based on this, we propose a new model-agnostic framework for multi-modal sequential recommendation tasks, called Online Distillation-enhanced Multi-modal Transformer (ODMT), to enhance feature interaction and mutual learning among multi-source input (ID, text, and image), while avoiding conflicts among different features during training, thereby improving recommendation accuracy. To be specific, we first introduce an ID-aware Multi-modal Transformer module in the item representation learning stage to facilitate information interaction among different features. Secondly, we employ an online distillation training strategy in the prediction optimization stage to make multi-source data learn from each other and improve prediction robustness. Experimental results on a stream media recommendation dataset and three e-commerce recommendation datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed two modules, which is approximately 10% improvement in performance compared to baseline models.
ConDistFL: Conditional Distillation for Federated Learning from Partially Annotated Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Developing a generalized segmentation model capable of simultaneously delineating multiple organs and diseases is highly desirable. Federated learning (FL) is a key technology enabling the collaborative development of a model without exchanging training data. However, the limited access to fully annotated training data poses a major challenge to training generalizable models. We propose "ConDistFL", a framework to solve this problem by combining FL with knowledge distillation. Local models can extract the knowledge of unlabeled organs and tumors from partially annotated data from the global model with an adequately designed conditional probability representation. We validate our framework on four distinct partially annotated abdominal CT datasets from the MSD and KiTS19 challenges. The experimental results show that the proposed framework significantly outperforms FedAvg and FedOpt baselines. Moreover, the performance on an external test dataset demonstrates superior generalizability compared to models trained on each dataset separately. Our ablation study suggests that ConDistFL can perform well without frequent aggregation, reducing the communication cost of FL. Our implementation will be available at https://github.com/NVIDIA/NVFlare/tree/dev/research/condist-fl.
Gorilla: Safe Permissionless Byzantine Consensus
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

Nakamoto's consensus protocol works in a permissionless model and tolerates Byzantine failures, but only offers probabilistic agreement. Recently, the Sandglass protocol has shown such weaker guarantees are not a necessary consequence of a permissionless model; yet, Sandglass only tolerates benign failures, and operates in an unconventional partially synchronous model. We present Gorilla Sandglass, the first Byzantine tolerant consensus protocol to guarantee, in the same synchronous model adopted by Nakamoto, deterministic agreement and termination with probability 1 in a permissionless setting. We prove the correctness of Gorilla by mapping executions that would violate agreement or termination in Gorilla to executions in Sandglass, where we know such violations are impossible. Establishing termination proves particularly interesting, as the mapping requires reasoning about infinite executions and their probabilities.
Heterogeneous 360 Degree Videos in Metaverse: Differentiated Reinforcement Learning Approaches
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

Advanced video technologies are driving the development of the futuristic Metaverse, which aims to connect users from anywhere and anytime. As such, the use cases for users will be much more diverse, leading to a mix of 360-degree videos with two types: non-VR and VR 360-degree videos. This paper presents a novel Quality of Service model for heterogeneous 360-degree videos with different requirements for frame rates and cybersickness. We propose a frame-slotted structure and conduct frame-wise optimization using self-designed differentiated deep reinforcement learning algorithms. Specifically, we design two structures, Separate Input Differentiated Output (SIDO) and Merged Input Differentiated Output (MIDO), for this heterogeneous scenario. We also conduct comprehensive experiments to demonstrate their effectiveness.
From Unimodal to Multimodal: improving sEMG-Based Pattern Recognition via deep generative models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Objective: Multimodal hand gesture recognition (HGR) systems can achieve higher recognition accuracy compared to unimodal HGR systems. However, acquiring multimodal gesture recognition data typically requires users to wear additional sensors, thereby increasing hardware costs. Methods: This paper proposes a novel generative approach to improve Surface Electromyography (sEMG)-based HGR accuracy via virtual Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) signals. Specifically, we trained a deep generative model based on the intrinsic correlation between forearm sEMG signals and forearm IMU signals to generate virtual forearm IMU signals from the input forearm sEMG signals at first. Subsequently, the sEMG signals and virtual IMU signals were fed into a multimodal Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model for gesture recognition. Results: We conducted evaluations on six databases, including five publicly available databases and our collected database comprising 28 subjects performing 38 gestures, containing both sEMG and IMU data. The results show that our proposed approach significantly outperforms the sEMG-based unimodal HGR approach (with increases of 2.15%-13.10%). Moreover, it achieves accuracy levels closely matching those of multimodal HGR when using virtual Acceleration (ACC) signals. Conclusion: It demonstrates that incorporating virtual IMU signals, generated by deep generative models, can significantly improve the accuracy of sEMG-based HGR. Significance: The proposed approach represents a successful attempt to bridge the gap between unimodal HGR and multimodal HGR without additional sensor hardware, which can help to promote further development of natural and cost-effective myoelectric interfaces in the biomedical engineering field.
I-WAS: a Data Augmentation Method with GPT-2 for Simile Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Simile detection is a valuable task for many natural language processing (NLP)-based applications, particularly in the field of literature. However, existing research on simile detection often relies on corpora that are limited in size and do not adequately represent the full range of simile forms. To address this issue, we propose a simile data augmentation method based on \textbf{W}ord replacement And Sentence completion using the GPT-2 language model. Our iterative process called I-WAS, is designed to improve the quality of the augmented sentences. To better evaluate the performance of our method in real-world applications, we have compiled a corpus containing a more diverse set of simile forms for experimentation. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed data augmentation method for simile detection.
Optimizing Adaptive Video Streaming with Human Feedback
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2023
Year: 2023

Quality of Experience~(QoE)-driven adaptive bitrate (ABR) algorithms are typically optimized using QoE models that are based on the mean opinion score~(MOS), while such principles may not account for user heterogeneity on rating scales, resulting in unexpected behaviors. In this paper, we propose Jade, which leverages reinforcement learning with human feedback~(RLHF) technologies to better align the users' opinion scores. Jade's rank-based QoE model considers relative values of user ratings to interpret the subjective perception of video sessions. We implement linear-based and Deep Neural Network (DNN)-based architectures for satisfying both accuracy and generalization ability. We further propose entropy-aware reinforced mechanisms for training policies with the integration of the proposed QoE models. Experimental results demonstrate that Jade performs favorably on conventional metrics, such as quality and stall ratio, and improves QoE by 8.09%-38.13% in different network conditions, emphasizing the importance of user heterogeneity in QoE modeling and the potential of combining linear-based and DNN-based models for performance improvement.
Current and Future Challenges in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Knowledge Representation and Reasoning is a central, longstanding, and active area of Artificial Intelligence. Over the years it has evolved significantly; more recently it has been challenged and complemented by research in areas such as machine learning and reasoning under uncertainty. In July 2022 a Dagstuhl Perspectives workshop was held on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. The goal of the workshop was to describe the state of the art in the field, including its relation with other areas, its shortcomings and strengths, together with recommendations for future progress. We developed this manifesto based on the presentations, panels, working groups, and discussions that took place at the Dagstuhl Workshop. It is a declaration of our views on Knowledge Representation: its origins, goals, milestones, and current foci; its relation to other disciplines, especially to Artificial Intelligence; and on its challenges, along with key priorities for the next decade.
Assistive Chatbots for healthcare: a succinct review
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Artificial Intelligence (AI) for supporting healthcare services has never been more necessitated than by the recent global pandemic. Here, we review the state-of-the-art in AI-enabled Chatbots in healthcare proposed during the last 10 years (2013-2023). The focus on AI-enabled technology is because of its potential for enhancing the quality of human-machine interaction via Chatbots, reducing dependence on human-human interaction and saving man-hours. Our review indicates that there are a handful of (commercial) Chatbots that are being used for patient support, while there are others (non-commercial) that are in the clinical trial phases. However, there is a lack of trust on this technology regarding patient safety and data protection, as well as a lack of wider awareness on its benefits among the healthcare workers and professionals. Also, patients have expressed dissatisfaction with Natural Language Processing (NLP) skills of the Chatbots in comparison to humans. Notwithstanding the recent introduction of ChatGPT that has raised the bar for the NLP technology, this Chatbot cannot be trusted with patient safety and medical ethics without thorough and rigorous checks to serve in the `narrow' domain of assistive healthcare. Our review suggests that to enable deployment and integration of AI-enabled Chatbots in public health services, the need of the hour is: to build technology that is simple and safe to use; to build confidence on the technology among: (a) the medical community by focussed training and development; (b) the patients and wider community through outreach.
Robust retrieval of material chemical states in X-ray microspectroscopy
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

X-ray microspectroscopic techniques are essential for studying morphological and chemical changes in materials, providing high-resolution structural and spectroscopic information. However, its practical data analysis for reliably retrieving the chemical states remains a major obstacle to accelerating the fundamental understanding of materials in many research fields. In this work, we propose a novel data formulation model for X-ray microspectroscopy and develop a dedicated unmixing framework to solve this problem, which is robust to noise and spectral variability. Moreover, this framework is not limited to the analysis of two-state material chemistry, making it an effective alternative to conventional and widely-used methods. In addition, an alternative directional multiplier method with provable convergence is applied to obtain the solution efficiently. Our framework can accurately identify and characterize chemical states in complex and heterogeneous samples, even under challenging conditions such as low signal-to-noise ratios and overlapping spectral features. Extensive experimental results on simulated and real datasets demonstrate its effectiveness and reliability.
Will your Doorbell Camera still recognize you as you grow old
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Robust authentication for low-power consumer devices such as doorbell cameras poses a valuable and unique challenge. This work explores the effect of age and aging on the performance of facial authentication methods. Two public age datasets, AgeDB and Morph-II have been used as baselines in this work. A photo-realistic age transformation method has been employed to augment a set of high-quality facial images with various age effects. Then the effect of these synthetic aging data on the high-performance deep-learning-based face recognition model is quantified by using various metrics including Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves and match score distributions. Experimental results demonstrate that long-term age effects are still a significant challenge for the state-of-the-art facial authentication method.
Actor-Critic with variable time discretization via sustained actions
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Reinforcement learning (RL) methods work in discrete time. In order to apply RL to inherently continuous problems like robotic control, a specific time discretization needs to be defined. This is a choice between sparse time control, which may be easier to train, and finer time control, which may allow for better ultimate performance. In this work, we propose SusACER, an off-policy RL algorithm that combines the advantages of different time discretization settings. Initially, it operates with sparse time discretization and gradually switches to a fine one. We analyze the effects of the changing time discretization in robotic control environments: Ant, HalfCheetah, Hopper, and Walker2D. In all cases our proposed algorithm outperforms state of the art.
Apple Vision Pro for Healthcare: "The Ultimate Display"? -- Entering the Wonderland of Precision Medicine
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

At the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June 2023, Apple introduced the Vision Pro. The Vision Pro is a Mixed Reality (MR) headset, more specifically it is a Virtual Reality (VR) device with an additional Video See-Through (VST) capability. The VST capability turns the Vision Pro also into an Augmented Reality (AR) device. The AR feature is enabled by streaming the real world via cameras to the (VR) screens in front of the user's eyes. This is of course not unique and similar to other devices, like the Varjo XR-3. Nevertheless, the Vision Pro has some interesting features, like an inside-out screen that can show the headset wearers' eyes to "outsiders" or a button on the top, called "Digital Crown", that allows you to seamlessly blend digital content with your physical space by turning it. In addition, it is untethered, except for the cable to the battery, which makes the headset more agile, compared to the Varjo XR-3. This could actually come closer to the "Ultimate Display", which Ivan Sutherland had already sketched in 1965. Not available to the public yet, like the Ultimate Display, we want to take a look into the crystal ball in this perspective to see if it can overcome some clinical challenges that - especially - AR still faces in the medical domain, but also go beyond and discuss if the Vision Pro could support clinicians in essential tasks to spend more time with their patients.